Pelt Mapping for XSI
polycounter lvl 18
Hey XSI heads. Just found this linked from XSIBase...
http://www.highend3d.com/xsi/downloads/plugins/texturing/3805.html
XSI has great UV tools but it's been missing some sort of auto unwrap or pelting system till now. This is a first gen plugin but it looks very promising already!
http://www.highend3d.com/xsi/downloads/plugins/texturing/3805.html
XSI has great UV tools but it's been missing some sort of auto unwrap or pelting system till now. This is a first gen plugin but it looks very promising already!
Replies
New one by Helge Mathee of Mindthink. I like this one much better. It's easier to use and just works without having to play with a bunch of obscure spring settings. Still in beta, but I got it to do this pretty quick:
Check out the demo videos on the download page (registration required).
If you watch the videos that are posted on Mindthink along with the plugin you can see that the pelt frames themselves are editable into shapes other than a circle (they are just closed curves). Haven't messed with that too much yet myself though.
You can also paint weights onto the pelt in realtime to pin down areas that you don't want to calculate anymore... again, in the videos.
It's more readable in a 2d app with far fewer steps, and less tweaking required in the end, but then, this tool is integrated into the app by the devs. I think a lot of XSI users will be happy just to have some form of auto UV layout for now rather than none.
Modo Unwrap Tool Video
Here's the same mesh with the same UV seam cuts using modo's unwrap tool:
It's more readable in a 2d app with far fewer steps, and less tweaking required in the end, but then, this tool is integrated into the app by the devs. I think a lot of XSI users will be happy just to have some form of auto UV layout for now rather than none.
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Actually wings 3d has had the exact same Unwrap tool, for free long before modo decided to implement it without credit
Actually wings 3d has had the exact same Unwrap tool, for free long before modo decided to implement it without credit
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don't bother. I've been saying this for months.
It's not about who does it first, but how quickly good tools and workflows become standards found in all apps - especially when some of us are using different programs in production. The reality is that the little guys will always innovate and the big guys will take those ideas and make money with them and then more artists will be able to use those tools to make cool shit with.
Everyone benefits either way - including the hippie open source coder(s)who bring a cool new idea to the table and watch as the big fish eat it up and crap it out into the market for more people to have access to. Knowledge and good ideas are still being spread albeit through commercialization of them. =]
3D is still an overly complicated medium. I'm looking forward to seeing it improve as quickly as possible. Whether this happens because of or in spite of free, open source tools makes no difference to me.
Software debates suck. Lets talk more about Pelting, Unwrapping, and other forms of UV goodness. Better yet - how they can be improved. =]
I'll start by saying I think the new UV tweak tool in PolyBoost 2.0 (max plugin) is one of the coolest UV tools I've ever seen! That should be in every app! I hate that bloated tool panel though! FUGLY! =D
PolyBoost 2 Video
It's still really good today. Very fast and easy. You can try it totally free for 30 days.
Now I'm using UNFOLD3d which is pretty damn good for a free app. Requires some initial setup though:
http://www.polygonal-design.fr/e_unfold/index.php
Really like MODO's version you posted. The whole click..drag...done thing is pretty cool.
-pod
I really liked using the trial version of unfold3d. My biggest peev with it was that there's no way to tweak or edit your UV's once they are unwrapped until you get the object back into your 3d app. I made a lengthy rant/post about my thoughts on that in the unfold3d forum. I think if you are going to market a dedicated UV app you really need to make it a one stop solution for any and all UV needs.
Thanks for the deep UV reminder podman!
Talking about painting on uvs like this, its not all that different, but i would generally just paint over a light bake to find out where everything goes... And of course a basic sketch layer should be the first thing you do whenever working with a newly uved model.
After the initial Unwrap in DeepUV, you can rearrange the border to your liking, select all the UV's within the border(but not the border) and do another RELAX operation. There is also a EVEN-UNWRAP option which spreads out all the UVs in a uniform manner.
Usually though, I take the unwrap job done in Unfold3d or DeepUv and use Maya's relax tool. Seems to do a good job seeing that the other Maya UV tools I'm not too fond of.
My other beef with UNFOLD3d, btw, is the fact that you have to physically "Cut up" the mesh to determine the UV borders which kinda sucks because you have to weld them back together in Maya/Max. Not a huge deal, but...
-pod
i usually sketch directly onto the model in 3d using alias' studiopaint. painterly feel, ability to mix 2d and 3d layers and really friendly projection - no artifacts
it's useful for distributing surface patterns as well but you'll still want to have something like photoshop to finetune colors and whatnot.
still using blender's lscm mapping but i just got myself a current version of wings3d to see what their uv tools do.
For any Lightwavers who might not be aware that you can use LW's dynamics to do unwrapping as well.
Nice work on the Walken caricature EQ!
the_podman: agreed on all points. Especially with cutting up seams outside of unfold3d. Make a mistake and you also have to go back to the 3d app to correct the seam, then bring it back to unfold. I believe seam creation was advertised as "coming soon" for the higher priced studio version last I checked, but considering how outrageous their pricing was for it, it may as well not exist at all. =]
I haven't tried studio paint myself... thanks for the heads up thomasp. LSCM in blender is pretty cool, especially for being free. I especially liked the pinning feature. Very cool way to fine tune the unwrap.
thomosp: Your post intriques me. What makes studio paint so different from Maya's own artisan 3d paint? I've been using DeepPaint to sketch out the rough texture, but I do get those artifacts you mention.
essentially it's a 2d painter with 3d paint capabilities, it's customizeable somewhat similar to maya with shelfes to store your brushes, custom tools, shapes, colors and other stuff. it has individual palette and layout settings per file (referred to as canvas). it integrates with maya and studiotools (ex/import-plugins, uses the same project folder structure).
the paint tools are the finest i've ever used. feels like using alias's sketchbook on dope. very natural feeling, brush settings are adjustable solely with a modifier key and a drag of the cursor. most functions are accessible via marking menu's so you're able to switch off the palettes for the most part.
it also has vector graphics capabilites - you can draw splines, bezier curves, verious primites, edit them, bake them to pixels, use them as masks or snap your cursor to them while painting.
the 3d speciality comes with the layer system. it's similar to photoshop except that you can mix layers containing pixels/vector graphics with those containing 3d objects. a 3d object can be uv'ed in studiopaint as well (uv tools are very similar to maya's - not that i like those
in studiopaint, when you're working directly in a 3d layer, you're always in projection mode. what i noticed is that it doesn't generate that many artifacts as other tools. deep paint - i still have nightmares from cleaning up behind that one
not so in studiopaint, you can set the filtering algorithm for performance vs. quality manually if neccessary and on good uv's there's no problem with it. also it works very user friendly when painting over edges. you have to really position your geo in a bad way and then paint over edges to see color spill. can't say that for e.g. zbrush where my cursor doesn't even have to overlap with an edge to generate artifacts on the other side... studiopaint is easy when it comes to painting over partially mirrored uv's and seams. it doesn't generate a mess out of the mirrored parts like some other tools.
in these days i do a lot of my basic texture work by baking the render output of a zbrushed hipoly down to a lowpoly inside max so i do not use studiopaint as much as i used to but essentially you can paint your entire texture with it without having to switch to other apps and merely use photoshop for color tweaks. that's possible because it has all the painting tools of a full fledged painting app (more than photoshop, actually). you can even use it for rotoscoping - it eats image sequences, too.
the one thing i do miss however is a smudge tool that behaves the photoshop-way. you can get close but there's still something different in the color blending.
oh and - it has no layer blending modes like photoshop. only the opacity can be adjusted for a layer. most obvious disadvantage is that an sgi workstation is required to run it. it has never been ported to anything else. it's a shame but i think a combo of photoshop, zbrush and bodypaint is the best you could get on a PC.
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/texturing/3869.html